A conversation with Professor Swen Hutter: 60% of European political parties running in elections avoid using the term “party”; one in five describes itself as a movement or avoids identifying as a party.
Professor Swen Hutter teaches political sociology at Freie Universität Berlin and directs the Center for Civil Society Research, between February and March he was a guest at the Istituto Ciampi in Florence, we had a talk with him on his recent research on “Political parties brands in Europe” which was also the title of the lecture he gave on the 10th of March. Among other things, that day he presented a paper on a survey made on the way parties change their names across Europe.
What question did you ask yourself starting this research for the paper?
What triggered this work paper is something we know quite a lot already: political parties are in major crisis, and not just in terms of how to communicate with voters on some programmatic issues such as how to tackle the refugee inflow or the climate crisis, but that the model of having parties that represent stable parts of society is in crisis. We see that across Europe where people are ever more dissatisfied with parties as political organizations, they distrust them, their affiliation is often volatile. This and the fact that we also observe other forms of participation, we see people being very active in politics by other means, be it on the streets or doing voluntary work and so on. Of course, there is already quite some rich research on of those interactions, for example, specific cases like in the US, where if we want to understand why the Republicans became so radicalized, we have to understand how the Tea Party movement and other actors changed that party from the bottom up. Our ambition was to go beyond these specific cases to see more broadly how parties try to talk, behave and organize differently to get a different public image from that of the model of the classical party organization, which is in crisis.
You just described what a party brand is not anymore, what is it then?
We focus on brand because ultimately, when we look at the political marketplace these days, parties really have different elements that they try to sell. The partisan brand by now is not related to what kind of program you propose, but it’s so many more elements, people associate certain colors with certain ideas, the kind of logos, the kind of names, the kind of behavior, the leaders. All these elements feed into the party brand that is kind of the association between what the party wants to represent and the signals that voters understand and associate with that brand. That is ultimately why I like this branding concept, it’s not just about what the producer wants to sell, but it is also about the perceptions of the consumer. Being here in Italy, thinking about a certain olive oil producer, quality is maybe the product, but it’s also how people see it and what price they would then be ready to pay for that product.
This has nothing to do with parties, but I’d say that Italy has become a brand.
Exactly, I have colleagues studying nation state branding (Jessica Gino Hecht), and it’s exactly that: sometimes, somehow the reality is outperformed by that image that you sell and that you have to reproduce somehow the stereotypes.
What are the reasons for this shift in name changing and all the rest?
Let me make this short. Given that I just said these brands have so many different elements, a social scientist also has to decide where do we get systematic kind of evidence and indicators for observing this long-term shift, one of them is the name. When we think about the Movimento Cinque Stelle, Podemos, Alternative fur Deutschland, we see that they have different kinds of names and all of them avoid the label “Party”. You no longer want to call yourself what you actually are, and I think that is exactly due to this crisis of representation and the crisis of the party model. You don’t want to sell your product as what it is because people have these negative associations with the term party and also with some of the more traditional ideologies that we see on the left and the right.
So, what did you find? What are parties doing when they change or choose a name?
We found that by now more than 60% of political organizations running in elections across European democracies are no longer called a party. Of course, it differs across countries, but in all we see more or less this trend. What we also find the use of metaphors and words that have nothing to do with traditional ideologies. Speaking again of Italy, by now we associate Forza Italia it with a clear-cut camp, but it could have been any kind of political party in Italy that could have called themselves Forza Italia. Same for Podemos in Spain, “we can”, so what do you can? So, we see that they give up the party word in the name and they give up this traditional baggage of we’re a social democratic, we’re Christian democrats or a conservative party. What some also do – that’s about one in every five parties – also takes up something that has a reference to social movements or of a different collective organization. They call themselves a movement, an alliance, a front, a march, something that also signals that it’s not just that we’re no longer a party and we’re no longer associated with this ideological old baggage, but we’re also something that shakes the system to some extent and represents the people more directly than this classical image of a party.
Almost all right-wing or far-right parties have “nation” or the name of the country in their names, which is not the case for the other side.
This kind of trend that I just talked about is quite pronounced on the far-right, so it is a phenomenon that very likely on that side of the spectrum. We also did some surveys in four European countries – Germany, Austria, Hungary and Italy – to see how people respond to these different terms, and that brings me to your question. Interestingly enough, if we have people rate terms like party, movement, communist, conservative, but also the name of the country, it is the name of the country that comes out as the most favored term on average and, interestingly enough, also it doesn’t differentiate too much between citizens on the left or the right or the more progressive and conservative side. Maybe the right has taken that label, but I think in many cases it would be also a good strategy of parties from the progressive left side to claim the label back. I’m originally from Switzerland, the Swiss People’s Party, the far-right party there has these big posters all around during the national election campaign claiming “we are the Swiss”, so we represent Switzerland. In that case, the left did a good move by reclaiming the idea of representing the nation
You also found that just changing your name does not work in electoral terms.
Exactly.
Probably names and brand are not all, some new political parties on the left had some success after a transition from a social movement (Podemos after the Indignados in Spain) or were in some way taking ideas from the movement toolbox (the Movimento 5 Stelle in Italy).
Emmanuel Macron and his Republique En Marche as it was first called, have invested lots of money to test the names. So, I think there is something there, but as you rightly said, this works when and because the name is an essential part of a broader package.
During your talk you mentioned the ways parties use this way of selling themselves as something different (movements) as a way to rebrand…
We talk about what we call the “movementization” of electoral politics, so that parties try to selectively borrow from what we associate with social movements or collective action. On the one hand we have the label, the names, but the other thing is behaving like a movement, so taking politics to the streets, co-sponsoring protest actions, and also organizing differently, in a much more networked structure that is open to civil society influences, to also kind of less hierarchical decision-making. We see that across Europe, parties are experimenting with all three features and elements, but few of them really have the full package. None is going with a different name, organized strongly in the streets and also open to society. The issue, I think, is that the far right have an easier task to just do this selective. According to our data, their way of presenting themselves even when a “movement” has a leadership-focused hierarchical structure, resonates with voters, whereas on the left the expectations are higher, if an actor claims to be different and to live a kind of real democracy the disappointment can also be much higher if it doesn’t live up to the full program. For those on the left coming out of movements and then running for elections, the expectations that are raised in these moments of mobilization are very difficult to sustain.